[In the following essay, Maher describes in detail John Gielgud's delivery of Hamlet's seven soliloquies in a 1936-1937 production staged in New York and London. In a narrative supplemented by comments from the actor himself, she relates the effects of varying tempos, speech breaks, gestures, lighting, and stage business on Gielgud's performance of these speeches, stressing that he spoke them as if they were communications with himself rather than with the audience.]

Because of his extensive and varied experience with Hamlet, John Gielgud owned the role of the prince in a way that no other twentieth-century actor could. As James Agate wrote of Gielgud's 1944 production, “Mr. Gielgud is now completely and authoritatively master of this tremendous part. He is, we feel, this generation's rightful tenant of this ‘monstrous Gothic castle of a poem’ … I hold that this is, and is likely to remain, the best Hamlet of our time.”¹ Gielgud played the role of Hamlet more than five hundred times in his long and distinguished career. He was one of the few modern actors who simultaneously performed in and directed himself as Hamlet. And in 1964 he was director of the play with yet another actor in the role, Richard Burton.

Gielgud read a draft of this essay before publication, adding his own insights, information, and commentary. His chart below delineates the places and occasions where his performances of Hamlet and his directorial involvement with the play occurred:

HAMLET

Gielgud's view of the chief character, his mode of playing, and much of his stage business set the fashion for Hamlets in the decades to come. In discussing the acting of a scene in the 1936 production, Bernard Grebanier asserted: “Because of the great prestige of Gielgud's wonderful production, it has more or less become a tradition to play the scene … in the same way.”⁴ In a 1988 television documentary titled “John Gielgud: An Actor's Life,” the narrator said, “His memorable assumption of some roles has stamped an impression so deep that other actors have found it difficult to erase.”⁵ As a model for others, Gielgud cannot be overestimated. Here, indeed, was a definitive Hamlet.

Gielgud came to the role steeped in its nuances and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of past performances. A member of the famous theatrical family of Terrys, he “knew by heart the vivid description in Ellen Terry's memoirs of how Irving played it.”⁶ But when asked if he had modeled his performance after anyone, he replied,

No, I didn't. I thought I had. I thought I would copy all the actors I'd ever seen, in turn, and by then I'd seen about a dozen or fifteen Hamlets [including H. B. Irving (Sir Henry's son), Ernest Milton, Henry Baynton, Arthur Phillips, Colin Keith-Johnston, and John Barrymore].⁷ Of course, [the elder, Sir Henry] Irving was my god, although I'd never seen him. … I didn't try to copy, I only took note of all the things he'd done and looked at the pictures of him and so on. But when it came to the Vic, the play moved so fast and there was so much of it that I suddenly felt, “Well, I've just got to be myself,” and I really played it absolutely straight as far as I could. Of course, I was fortunate in that … Hamlet had never been allowed to be given to a very young actor until I played it. It was the kind of prize that an actor, when he went into management at the age of forty or fifty, H. B. Irving, for instance … allowed himself.⁸

Gielgud seldom borrowed performance ideas from other actors for his Hamlet and only rarely from what he knew of Irving. He knew what other actors had done because that was the norm for actors, as well as theatre critics, in his age. But he felt that his portrayal was based on his own personality rather than anyone else's version.

Gielgud played his first Hamlet in 1929, at the age of twenty-six, and his last in 1945. This essay will focus on his 1936 production because it was the best-documented. In that production, Gielgud's acting of the role was neither as melodramatic and passionate as Barrymore's, nor as bloodless and delicate as Leslie Howard's. Howard's Hamlet opened in New York within a month of Gielgud's. The press created a “War of the Hamlets,” thus generating publicity and box office sales for Gielgud's, which the critics preferred.⁹ Indeed, he was in top form for this second shot at it:

The most thrilling Hamlet for me was the production in New York in 1936, because I felt I was on my mettle. It was my first big chance in America, and I was presented by an American management with an all-American cast. … Rehearsals were thrilling because everyone seemed so excited about my performance.¹⁰

Critics reviewing the production spoke of his restraint from bellowing and ranting, his intellectualism, and his “modernizing” of the role, which appears to mean not only a simplicity and a spontaneity in the acting of it but also a retention of the doubleness of Hamlet's character.¹¹ Gielgud kept the sardonic humor and the occasionally violent language;¹² he remained noble, still very much the prince, yet he did not lack fire. Certainly, his performance choices suggest a volatile Hamlet. The play-within-the-play scene was unusually active: He actually held a manuscript (presumably the “dozen or sixteen lines” he asked the First Player to insert) and thumped out the meter of the lines as the players spoke. He also walked around during the performance of “The Mouse-trap,” dropping pointed phrases into the ears of both king and queen. As the playlet closed, he leaped onto the king's empty throne, shouting triumphantly, waving the manuscript in the air and ultimately tearing it to tiny pieces, which he threw like confetti.¹³ He even took snuff from a silver box and then offered some to the gravedigger in that comic scene.¹⁴ The combination of melodramatic and realistic effects accounts for his being labeled both traditional and nontraditional. The public admired the performance, and the play ran for more than four months. He was feted lavishly in New York and afterwards on tour.

The production had opened at the Empire Theatre in New York and then transferred to the St. James's Theatre. It ran from October 8, 1936, to January 30, 1937. The 132 performances were produced by Guthrie McClintic and designed by Jo Mielziner. The design was “in the period,” meaning Renaissance in style. It is the most thoroughly documented of the actor's portrayals because of Rosamond Gilder's book John Gielgud's “Hamlet,” in which she attempted to create a “verbal portrait”¹⁵ of the production, a scene-by-scene description of both gestures and blocking as he played the role. The opening chapter discussed character conception in a generalized way and was followed with notes from the actor himself.¹⁶ Gilder's descriptions were a compiled account of what Gielgud most often did during each segment of the play. Although parts of it wax poetic in admiration of Gielgud, the book is nevertheless a remarkable endeavor in the annals of theatre history.

Gilder's account provides a sense of the actor's journey through the play. In the first “act” of the play (the production was divided into two acts, or nineteen scenes with one intermission¹⁷), Gielgud was manic but never totally mad, and within the second half he presented an integrated personality who had come to terms with what he had to do.¹⁸ Gielgud mapped out certain “shocks,” histrionic moments of realization, such as the Ghost's revelation of murder, which built to the firm resolution in the seventh soliloquy, “How all occasions do inform against me” (IV.iv.32-36).

Gielgud performed the first soliloquy (“O that this too too sallied flesh,” I.ii.129-59),¹⁹ as if anguish were its chief tonal quality. It followed a court scene which was rendered intimate and domestic since the courtiers and attendants exited at I.i.63 once the official business concluded. Consequently, Hamlet's discussion with Claudius and Gertrude was decorously private, yet he clearly indicated that he disliked his uncle. After the king and queen exited, he began his soliloquy by making an important transition for the audience, effecting a change between the character's outer persona as presented to Gertrude and Claudius and the private self, who suffered from events. Gilder observed: “As the doors close behind them, the mask of manners that has protected Hamlet's face drops.”²⁰

Gielgud continued the soliloquy by walking slowly upstage and coming to rest at the end of the council table. Finally, he turned and looked outward but did not make contact with the audience. On “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” each word dropped a note lower than the one before. As he began “so loving to my mother,” the tempo accelerated as nausea about the recent marriage filled him. On the beat that ended “Let me not think on't,” he covered his face with his hands. Unable to still his mind, he surged on obsessively: “a little month” began a build to the climax of “incestious sheets.” On the final two lines, he sank back “into apathy and hopeless sorrow.”²¹ The soliloquy was delivered with two major vocal builds, some general slow movement about the set, and variety in emotion using horror and growing disgust as sizzling punctuation marks within a context of depression or “dull bitterness.”²²

In this soliloquy, Gielgud felt that pauses should be omitted except at the “natural places” marked for breath or when there were “full stops” (i.e., end-stopped lines).²³ A short pause was needed before “Frailty, thy name is woman” and a more definite break required before the summarizing couplet at the end. Nevertheless, there should be a drive through the speech at an unswerving speed as “thoughts and exclamations succeed each other.”²⁴

Gielgud wrote about the first soliloquy as one of the most exciting for the actor because it “seem[ed] to set the character once and for all in the audience's minds.”²⁵ His actor's instincts told him that its position of primacy made it extremely important in establishing the audience-actor relationship. Once he had spoken, the actor could not make major changes in the character conception. Gielgud described the speech as a reaction to the first of a series of “shocks and surprises” that accumulate in the play. He felt that Hamlet, placed in an impossible predicament, found his way to his fate through episodes like this one.²⁶ Since the actor spoke to himself (avoiding eye contact with individuals), he had no other need than to be truthful. The audience was eavesdropping on his agonies.

The second soliloquy (at I.v.92-112) was clearly the second major shock in Hamlet's Denmark. It followed a very dramatic appearance by the Ghost, which ended with Hamlet's body lying on the ground racked with sobs. Gilder described the atmosphere: “The quick step and harsh quick words are the outward sign of all that has been growing in him since he heard of the Ghost, the tension that rises steadily, notch by notch, like a tightened violin string till it cracks at the Ghost's departure.”²⁷

Gielgud was aided by scenic effects here. The stage was darkened, and there was the eerie sound of wind blowing as Hamlet appeared on the ramparts. After the exchange between Ghost and son, Gielgud fell to his knees, his hand extended to the departing creature as lights blacked out for a hushed pause. Soon lights came up again faintly, and the soliloquy began with an “animal wail of pain”:

He turns on himself, self-lacerating, driving unpityingly … little by little, he raises himself on one knee. He is bruised, beaten; only his will remains and forces him up, governing even the “distracted globe” which is indeed overburdened to the verge of frenzy.

“Ay, thou poor ghost” brings again the note of tenderness and pity, pity for the dead and for his father in his torment. The second “Remember thee” is an oath. The words that follow come quickly, rising in a swift crescendo of dedication to the final “yes, by heaven” which brings him to his feet. A pause, and then the infamy sweeps over him. “O most pernicious woman!” His first thought, even before Claudius and murder, is of her. Then his mind turns to Claudius—to the morning scene of flattery and smug smiles, to the laughter and revelry below at this very moment. His voice breaks with anger at such villainy. He moves to the right, almost to the spot where the Ghost had stood. On the tablet from which he has just wiped all “trivial fond records,” on his brain seared by the Ghost's revelations, he will register this shame. The phrase ends on a high, hard challenge: “So, uncle, there you are,” as he strikes his forehead with his hand.

Then, deep and very quiet, the oath of consecration, “Now to my word.” Both hands clasp the sword-hilt. The blade gleams in an arc as he raises it to his lips. He stands straight as a lance, the silver line above his head piercing heavenward in salute. Slowly, with finality, with full and weary prescience, he lowers the sword, “I have sworn 't.”²⁸

Gilder's description of the soliloquy and her use of the word “frenzy” indicates that Gielgud enacted a total collapse, a physical shattering as well as mental chaos. The soliloquy was as personal as a nervous breakdown. It was therefore not shared with the theatre audience. He was deeply shaken but managed to restore his equilibrium through the ritual resolve of the final vow.

Gielgud's notes mention two pieces of business. To record in the “table of my memory,” he “banged [his] head” at “So, uncle, there you are,” since that phrase marked the conclusion of a long beat. Gielgud wanted his hands and body free from notebooks or other properties throughout the speech in order to use gestures which demonstrated the full physicality of the moment. He had earlier contrived to relieve himself of his cloak at the beginning of the scene, just in case it should hamper expression.²⁹

For the third soliloquy (“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” II.ii.550-605), Gielgud followed a through-line of action which began in the previous scene with the players. He had read and been convinced of the appropriateness of Harley Granville Barker's logic that references like “the unnerved father falls” as well as the mention of Hecuba and the “mobled Queen” (Gertrude, he felt) should explicitly be reacted to by Hamlet. After the Hecuba speech, he took a very long pause to study the player's face as if he saw within the man a reflection of his own dilemma. This set the audience up for the forthcoming comparison of the player's emotions to Hamlet's emotions, a major propellant in the thrust of the third soliloquy. Hamlet reprimanded Polonius in telling him how to treat the players, making his rebuke an “explosion”³⁰ rather than advice, since tension had mounted under his skin during the player's speech. All of the players exited, and Hamlet drew one of them aside to ask for some “dozen or sixteen lines” to be inserted into the Gonzago play.³¹

Then followed a piece of business which helped Gielgud make the transition into the soliloquy. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remained onstage to continue talking with Hamlet; however, “with a swift, repelling gesture, he dismisses them.”³² He then took a long pause, his back turned to the audience, and leaned on his hands on the table. This gesture endowed the first line “Now I am alone,” with special meaning: in his desolation, he shared his anguish with no one. This also gave him preparation time for the burst of bottled anger that launched the whole first section of the soliloquy.

“O, what a rogue” began a torrent of self-deprecation, and Gielgud continued a vocal build to “damn'd defeat was made,” whereupon he fell on a stool. But the battering of self had not stopped. He plunged into the short questions with vehement speed, rising quickly on “Who does me this?” There was a third build; this time his body shook with anger, the pitch of his voice rose up on “treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!”³³ On the famous climactic “Oh Vengeance!” he grabbed his dagger and smashed it into the doorway; the dagger fell from his raised arm, and his body melted onto the top step with a pitiful bleat, “Fie upon it! Foh!” A long pause ensued in which only sobbing could be heard.³⁴

Finally, there was a slow movement: he raised his head tentatively on “About, my brains.” Soon an idea was seen registering on his face, his voice hoarse and whispery. Once he had begun, the details of the plan were important and accumulated quickly. Gielgud added to this speed a bit of madness: “the look of one loosed out of hell.” He took a long pause before the final two lines in order to consider once more whether he was led by the devil or an honest ghost; his plan would ensure “grounds more relative.” The scene closed with feverish business: “Gielgud throws himself into a chair beside the table and begins to write wildly on a piece of paper. There is a blackout.”³⁵

Gielgud divided the soliloquy into two distinct performance beats. The first half built to near-climax and a culminating peak at “Oh Vengeance!” Then followed six lines of transition, with Gielgud on his knees. The second section, played downstage and closer to the audience, was about plotting, where Hamlet posed the play-within-the-play solution. The business at the end, scribbling wildly, was an idea borrowed from Irving, an epilogue in which the actor begged for favor. For Gielgud confessed that early on in his career, he felt the final couplet should provide the logical moment for the greatest applause in the play.³⁶ If an intermission was taken at this point, there was great argument for playing for these effects; the break also allowed a space between the third and fourth soliloquies, the former a great aria, the latter so like a philosophical dissertation. The difficulty, for the actor, came in starting up again so near “To be, or not be” while latecomers were seating themselves for the second half of the play. In this production, in fact, the interval break was taken later on, after the nunnery scene. Nevertheless, Gielgud insisted, “When I have played the part on first nights I have never been able to believe that I could succeed in it until this applause has come.”³⁷

The fourth soliloquy (“To be, or not to be,” III.i.55-89) followed a mere fifty-five lines later. The scene was in the great hall of the castle, a huge room with two flights of stairs. The business of stowing Ophelia had been dispatched by Polonius and Claudius. Hamlet came in defiantly, stage right. He saw that no one was there and continued to the stage left platform, where he began the famous lines thoughtfully and inwardly; there was no attempt to speak to the audience. Gielgud reported that it was occasionally difficult to ignore them because “frequently one can hear words and phrases being whispered by people in the front rows, just before one is going to speak them.”³⁸

This soliloquy was clearly more cerebral than the others; Gilder calls it “mystic contemplation.”³⁹ She recounts that each successive idea registered on Gielgud's face as Hamlet mentally shuffled the thoughts for consideration. The possibility and the longing toward death were balanced against the fear of what it means to no longer be alive. He seemed to be moving toward one concept particularly, a mind magnetized by the need to examine the void: perhaps it was like sleeping; perhaps it was like sleeping no more, and so Gielgud emphasized those words.⁴⁰

Gielgud used few gestures and little movement in delivering the speech. On “bare bodkin,” he omitted the actual knife but suggested it with a pantomimic movement of the left hand, as though a dagger lay point inward in his palm. On the phrase “puzzles the will,” he began to pace about the stage.⁴¹ His restless movement at this juncture indicated that he had returned from his trance to the world of action. He needed to get on with the task. Ophelia entered, and the spell of the speech was broken.

Gielgud carefully connected this speech with the big soliloquy which preceded it: “I now realize that the effect of despondency in ‘To be, or not to be’ is a natural and brilliant psychological reaction from the violent and hopeless rage of the earlier speech.”⁴² Closely juxtaposed as they are, the two soliloquies provide differing but perfectly legitimate responses for a passionate and intelligent man: “Rogue and peasant slave” effectively purges, and “To be” theorizes, philosophizes, contemplates. Gielgud also noted that “various directors have changed the order of the scenes and placed the two soliloquies in an exchanged sequence. I can see no excuse for this theory.”⁴³

Gielgud believed that “To be, or not to be” was so arresting, so filled with images and intricate mental cul-de-sacs that it tended to lure the performer. However, it must not be delivered as a set piece or “turn”:

This particular speech in itself is such a perfect thing that if you have executed it correctly you are apt to feel complete and satisfied at the end of it, but not ready to go straight into the rest of the scene. Like so many other great speeches in this play, it has to be studied, spoken, re-studied and re-spoken until one can combine in it a perfect and complete form of poetry and spontaneous thought and at the same time use it only as a part of the action. The character and value of the speech lie in the fact that it leads on to the next part of the scene, just as it must grow out of the previous action. Of course, the better one speaks it and the more completely one can win the audience by a good delivery of it, the more difficult it is to join it to the subsequent conversation and interplay with other characters.⁴⁴

He attempted what he thought was a “great innovation by walking about in this speech,” but Mrs. Patrick Campbell came to the play one night and implored him to cut out the movement as it distracted from the lines.⁴⁵ He later added, “She was quite right and I never did it again.”⁴⁶

Both the third and the fourth soliloquies end in irresolution toward carrying out the deed. This Hamlet wanted resolution or he would not have chastised himself so caustically during the third soliloquy. “To be” showed that he had serious cause to consider the weighty consequences: once Hamlet decides to act, many people's lives are irrevocably altered.

The Gilder account reveals that the fifth soliloquy (“'Tis now the very witching time of night,” III.ii.388-99) was omitted entirely. In the text, it follows closely upon a quite exciting rendering of the scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorder, which Gielgud elected to play as follows:

As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern move forward to follow [Hamlet], he turns on them with the crack of a whip. A flash of upraised hands holding the recorder between them. A downward stroke and a sharp report as the recorder breaks in two across his knee. Then with a flourish, he hands a piece to each of the King's hounds. “Leave me friends!” high and hard. The spiral snaps off at its apex. The lights black out.⁴⁷

Gielgud explains the omission. Here was a place where he profited from the stage history of a former Hamlet:

The recorder scene [which precedes the “witching hour” soliloquy] was one of Irving's greatest triumphs, but many subsequent Hamlets cut it out. Personally, I would rather sacrifice almost anything else in the play, while admitting frankly that the breaking of the recorder at the end of it—taken also, I think, from Irving, though I am not sure—is pure theatrical business and not justified by the text. … I soccumbed [sic] to it at the Queen's Theatre [in his first Hamlet] … and found the resulting applause, and the chance of cutting several seconds playing time in a version that was inclined to run too long, too strong a combination to resist. When I played the soliloquy that followed, “'Tis now the very witching time of night,” the scene would pass entirely without applause. This soliloquy, with its curious references to Nero and Hamlet's thought of matricide (never touched on anywhere else in the play), is one that does not go with an audience. … Perhaps the speeches are too frankly Elizabethan⁴⁸ in feeling, or it may be that they have less poetic appeal than others. In any case they are very difficult to deliver and unrewarding to play.⁴⁹

Gielgud's choice to cut the fifth soliloquy is defensible from a theatrical point of view. First, he was performing his Hamlet at a time when to be ignorant of what other actors had done with this role was tantamount to not doing one's homework; certainly the critics were aware of traditional business, and the actor was also. Here, he chose to include business that was part of the performance tradition of Hamlet. Second, to deliver the soliloquy might have destroyed the moment in a scene that was carefully designed to reach a theatrical peak. Finally, the major point of the soliloquy, Hamlet's intention to “do such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on” had been aptly made without speaking those lines. The actor had made a performance choice—to act the intention of the lines rather than to say them. In a production where very few textual cuts were made, this one was perhaps justifiable.

The sixth soliloquy (“Now might I do it pat,” III.iii.73-96) took place in Claudius' “dressing room.”⁵⁰ Preparation for the scene was very intricate. The room contained a prie-dieu slightly to the left of a doorway draped in green; there was a chair to the right. As the king knelt to pray, he heard a noise, so he got up and swung the drapery back with his sword. Seeing nothing amiss, he laid the sword on the chair and returned to his praying. The audience was now fully anticipating an intruder, and when the drapery next shivered, Hamlet appeared and approached only so far as the chair, which he grasped. He saw the sword and announced, “Now might I do it pat,” as he snatched it and pulled his sword arm back to strike.⁵¹ All of this took place behind and out of sight of the king. As Hamlet spoke, the mental image of sending Claudius to heaven while his father's shade wandered in hell arrested his sword. On “Up, sword,” he cradled the long blade in his left arm and “crouching forward he pours out the venomous words, enunciating the plan he determines to carry out: then with a swift stealthy swing he is at the doorway again. One last glance, a flash, and he is gone.”⁵² The king looked up quickly at his empty chair, sensing a narrow escape as he saw that the sword had disappeared entirely and then heard Hamlet's cry to Gertrude offstage. It was one brief, illumined movement for Gielgud: an appearance, a quick judgment, a retreat—certainly not a moment for contemplation.⁵³

Gielgud was proud of the stage business with the sword, partly because he considered it to be his own invention. The sword had hampered physical action for Hamlet within the play scene, so it was arranged that Claudius carry it from there. Hamlet then collected it in Claudius' chamber and carried it off to Gertrude's closet: “Hamlet must, of course, enter [her chamber] with drawn sword in order to threaten his mother and kill Polonius.”⁵⁴ Property details of this kind had to have a logic for Gielgud because he felt the first obligation of the actor was to make the plot believable to the audience.

Furthermore, he felt that in his production, as well as in most productions, the prayer scene stretched truth extraordinarily. Like the fifth soliloquy, this speech “is one that does not go with an audience.”⁵⁵ Unless an elaborate staging plan was used to physically separate Claudius and Hamlet, the audience would simply not believe that the two characters could not overhear one another's soliloquies.

The last soliloquy (“How all occasions do inform against me,” IV.iv.32-66) is described by Gilder thus:

Scene 13. A plain in Denmark.

A backdrop suggests a barren stretch of plain with gnarled trees breaking the grey expanse. Fortinbras talks with one of his captains and there is a sound of martial music in the distance. As the two soldiers are leaving, right, Hamlet comes in from the opposite side with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and an attendant. He recalls the captain for a moment's colloquy on the subject of Fortinbras' expedition against Poland. The spectacle of this army of men ready to do battle, to die, for a “straw” arrests his attention. Shading his eyes with his hand he looks out toward the distant encampment. For a long moment he stands lost in thought and then dismisses the soldier. A word from Rosencrantz reminds him of the presence of his associates—and he sends them on ahead remaining alone in contemplation of his obsessing problem; thought and action in eternal conflict.⁵⁶

There was a distinct change of tone in the delivery of this soliloquy, which Gilder describes as “an inner assurance.” The self-deprecation was still present but seemed somehow more clear-eyed, more in perspective. The acting reflected this: “His tone is firm, the timbre of his voice strong and resonant, his few gestures clear-cut, decisive.”⁵⁷

As Hamlet described Fortinbras, he compared himself with the Norwegian prince. Fortinbras would endanger others' lives for a straw, an eggshell: one's motivations need not be overjustified if honor is the issue. Gielgud's Hamlet drew strength from the image of soldiers plunging to their deaths, and his eyes and face shone with rededication, his voice vibrated with purpose. “How stand I then” began a final vocal build to the end of the speech where the closing couplet rang out: “From this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” Gielgud's pose reflected readiness: “His hands strike downward, holding the edge of his cloak, his head is up and back, his whole movement vigorous.”⁵⁸ Via a process of self-communion, the actor “builds a nobler mansion for his self-accusation”⁵⁹ and emerges more decided than he has been in previous soliloquies. Now he saw an opportunity and embraced it. Gielgud viewed “How all occasions” as a “very important soliloquy” that showed Hamlet's state of mind as “clear, noble, and resolved” before he went to England, with a “clear understanding of his destiny and desire.”⁶⁰ Here was an assertion of the Victorian notion of the noble prince who valued honor above “the death of twenty thousand men.” After World War II and Vietnam, it would become less and less popular to find inspiration in Fortinbras, and, in fact, his portrayal on the stage would become more and more brutal and dictatorial.

Most of Gielgud's discussions of the soliloquies are rendered from the point of view of what must have been going on in Hamlet's mind as Hamlet talked with his inner self. It is important to note that the production emphasized Hamlet's friendlessness. Gielgud described him as lonely but betrayed and disappointed by his friends constantly. The relationship with Horatio never got developed, didn't give Hamlet support or comfort, and the character never quite “makes himself coherent.”⁶¹ Horatio remained a foil and a shadow. Ophelia didn't quite count as a confidante, either. Consequently, Hamlet was his own audience, and the theatre audience was in the position of overhearing very personal matters. The actor never violated decorum nor attempted to interact with the audience. In turn, the spectators did not become his sounding board or his support system. This self-communing Hamlet reflected the twentieth-century preoccupation with psychological realism. The performance choice to speak the soliloquies inwardly was consistent with the ideas of the decade.

In many ways, Gielgud's Hamlet was a product of the transition that theatre practice underwent in the first part of the twentieth century. The period of architectural realism that dominated the stage in the late 1800s—epitomized by Beerbohm Tree's live rabbits roaming the forests of A Midsummer Night's Dream—was only beginning to decline when Gielgud was a youth. Since the very first Hamlet he saw, at age twelve in 1916, had been H. B. Irving, son of his idol Sir Henry Irving, his early models came from a stage tradition that favored “authentic” scenic decor and broad, heavily gestural acting in which actors made “points,” dramatic bits of physical and vocal business that drew admiration and applause from the audience. G. B. Shaw complained that Barrymore had cut one-third of the text of Hamlet only to replace those minutes with extensive interpolated stage business.⁶²

However, Gielgud was also aware of reactions to and rebellions against an excess of stage ornamentation and of “artificial” acting. He was acquainted with the work of William Poel, who advocated a return to the continuous staging of Elizabethan practice, where scene followed scene in quick progression via the actors' entrances and exits without long waits and elaborate backstage scene changes. Gielgud's first performance of Hamlet (in 1929 at the Old Vic, directed by Harcourt Williams, a disciple of Poel's) harked back to Poel in its use of period costumes and settings, circa 1520.⁶³ The 1936 Hamlet dealt with here was a solid combination of old elements and new. It was set in 1620, used a fuller text than usual (approximately 250 lines were cut, but not one scene was completely omitted), and featured a young Hamlet. The proscenium arch stage was dressed for realism and employed small finishing touches in hand props; however, the overall visual sweep of the scene design was highly reminiscent of Gordon Craig and Robert Edmond Jones, whose futuristic styles created acting areas via arches, stairs, and levels in almost modular sets. Furthermore, the play flowed unhampered, and act curtains were replaced by blackouts; only slight changes were made on the permanent set between scenes by minimal shifting and redraping of existing set pieces. In the preface to Gilder's book, Gielgud acknowledged the influence of Gordon Craig's “unlocalized settings” and mentioned the “violent reaction against the old-fashioned realistic settings,” adding that “the necessity of using drop curtains, near the front of the stage … for short scenes during which furniture is being moved on the main stage, is most unsatisfactory.” Clearly, he saw himself as part of the new style of scenic decor.⁶⁴

Within this blend of styles, which looked backward to pictorial realism but forward to “the New Stagecraft,” only the internalized soliloquy would suffice, because the acting style continued to pay homage to realistic playing and the soliloquies needed to obey, as far as possible, the laws of realism. Great care was taken to aid audience members and to treat them as if this was the first time they had seen the play, a murder mystery which needed emphasis on certain phrases and specific non-verbal action to underline important plot information. Effort was made to link images within soliloquies to actual events the audience had witnessed: a given phrase was concretely joined to a scene which had just taken place or was about to take place. The scenes were simple and straightforward, with little transposing or rearranging of Shakespeare's original sequence. Moreover, there were no strewn properties, no excess of objects. The gestural scheme was spare, with Gielgud making sure at all times that his hands and body were free to express plot essentials and to complement the words with appropriate movement. Such perspicacity revealed an interest in the realistic elements of the plot—a notion that there must be a logic of language and action at work if onlookers were to comprehend and to perceive stage effects accurately. Gielgud himself spoke often of whether or not an audience made a connection between stage activity and the dialogue. Furthermore, Gielgud insisted that the soliloquies be organic to the whole play. Each one was carefully motivated so as to relieve it of a “set piece” quality. There was a great deal of emphasis on preparing for each soliloquy and integrating it into the action so that it was not treated as a declamation which became in and of itself a complete scene.

Although Gielgud clearly still “made points” in very physical dramatic actions, his primary concern was the coherent flow of the play. His audience peered through the fourth wall of the set and overheard the actor speak. He never once acknowledged their presence with direct eye contact. Although it is possible that the angle of vision changed somewhat as he moved from one theatre to another, he nevertheless described most of the houses he performed in as proscenium arch theatres, “all except Elsinore, and one performance extemporized in a senate house in Madras during a monsoon!”⁶⁵ When directly asked about the matter, he explained:

It is impossible to describe one's method of acting in details of eye contact and changes of movement, etc. I have never bothered to examine them myself, feeling that it would make me unduly self-conscious. One tries to assess every new audience according to the way they seem to respond, and works to gauge their reactions as the play proceeds, but in Shakespeare one does certainly play outwards quite deliberately towards the audience. The few times I played away from a proscenium—Elsinore and Madras—I found the proximity of the audience stimulating but also distracting, especially if one has good eyesight as I have, and cannot keep [from] noticing individual faces or odd clothes.⁶⁶

Gielgud strongly advised that “the soliloquy is most easily spoken close to the footlights,”⁶⁷ “always as far downstage as possible”⁶⁸—references to that trough of lights so often present in proscenium arch theatres. A Hamlet would have been deterred from addressing the theatre audience because the lights in his eyes would have prevented him from seeing them and thus would have worked to separate actor and audience. We can rest assured that this actor would have made eyes and face visible and available to the audience, and he also would have been distinctly and precisely tuned to stirrings and responses from them. However, he never described himself as the ultimate sharer with the audience nor did he make specific efforts to contact them.

The inward soliloquy elicited a certain kind of performance from the actor. In this production, Gielgud's movements were large, flowing, and melodramatic. Although some of this was due to the façon of acting, there was another reason. If the actor does not step forward onto the apron and “say” his feelings to an audience, i.e., articulate the depth of his emotions directly, then he can be granted license to more broadly en-act them, to increase the physical size and scope of his performance. Stepping forward to address the audience is a step nearer to bringing the camera in closer; it is the stage analogue of a close-up shot. And stepping back from the camera (from the audience) allows the actor larger physical manifestations of his inner emotion.

Interestingly enough, Gielgud still gained sympathy from his audience. His Hamlet suffered great angst totally alone, without support from the cast or sustenance from the theatre audience. There was, inside the fourth wall of realism and inside the world of this production, no one to talk to. The interaction and energies the actor might otherwise have shared with an audience were channeled into the performance he was giving. The inward soliloquy bypassed direct persuasion of an audience and worked toward enthralling it via the force of the actor's charisma. Gielgud's acting made this clear. It was a performance which combined highlighted theatrical moments with the psychological realism of an internally tormented man trapped in a web of circumstantial events. His tears, though not in the tradition of the Victorian “manly man,” elicited pity and secured the compassion of his audience.

It was of major importance that Gielgud's soliloquies were not delivered using direct eye contact with the audience. This tradition remained strong in the theatre up through the middle of the twentieth century. Although Gielgud did not set the fashion, and although his presentation did not take place on a “realistic set,” his model was enormously influential in perpetuating the tradition of performing the world's most famous speeches during the first half of the twentieth century, a period when the basic actor-audience relationship in theatre structures was changing. It was not until the sixties that other actors began to experiment with the performance mode of the soliloquies within theatre spaces. Gielgud truly was “the glass of fashion and the mould of form” through which modern Hamlets mirrored themselves.

Notes

1. Gyles Brandreth, John Gielgud: A Celebration (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 64.

2. This was the production documented by Rosamond Gilder in John Gielgud's Hamlet: A Record of Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937).

3. Richard Burton's soliloquies are discussed in a later chapter.

4. Bernard Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor (New York: David McKay, 1975), 488. The italics are mine.

5. John Miller, narrator for “John Gielgud: An Actor's Life,” a “Great Performances” series program produced in association with WNET, Channel 13, Executive Producer, Jac Venza, copyright TVS, 1988.

6. Gielgud, quoted in Gilder, 165-69.

7. Gielgud added this list of Hamlets he had viewed to the quotation cited here when he was reviewing this chapter.

8. Hal Burton, Great Acting (New York: Bonanza Books, Crown, 1967), 140.

9. See the discussion in Frances Teague, “Hamlet in the Thirties,” Theatre Survey (May 1985): 71-75.

10. John Gielgud, An Actor and His Time (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1979), 85.

11. See Brooks Atkinson, review of Hamlet, New York Times, October 9, 1930, and also “A Sensitive, Restrained Hamlet,” review in Literary Digest (October 24, 1981): 24.

12. Gilder, 14.

13. Gilder, 165-69.

14. Gilder, 213.

15. Gilder, 6.

16. The promptbook is housed in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library's Performing Arts Research Center, item no. *NCP 1937.

17. Gilder, 81.

18. Gilder, 13-20.

19. In Gilder, Gielgud explains: “In this speech I very much wished to use the word ‘sullied’ for ‘solid.’ It is now agreed upon by most of the commentators as the correct reading, but fearing I should be accused either of altering the line because I am thin [i.e., not terribly “solid”], or else of pronouncing ‘solid’ with an Oxford accent, I gave up the idea” (138). Line numberings are from G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

20. Gilder, 95.

21. Gilder, 95.

22. Gilder, 41.

23. Gilder, 39.

24. Gilder, 39.

25. Gilder, 38.

26. This comment from Gielgud in no. 5 in a series of BBC interviews titled “Hamlet: The Actor's View,” recorded April 6, 1954, and now located at the National Archives of Sound, London, item DSUB-PC 10107W, X20424.

27. Gilder, 107.

28. Gilder, 115.

29. Gilder, 49.

30. Gilder, 146.

31. Gilder, 146-47.

32. Gilder, 147.

33. Italics, denoting emphasis, are Gilder's, on 147.

34. Gilder, 148.

35. Gilder, 148. Gielgud attributed the business of writing to Irving.

36. Gilder, 53.

37. Gilder, 53.

38. Gilder, 55.

39. Gilder, 151.

40. Gilder, 152. Gielgud added in a personal note that “Shakespeare seems to echo this agony in the murder scene of Macbeth.”

41. Gilder, 153.

42. Gilder, 55.

43. Note added to chapter by Gielgud.

44. Gilder, 55.

45. Gilder, 55.

46. Note added to chapter by Gielgud.

47. Gilder, 173.

48. Gielgud adds in a note: “By ‘frankly Elizabethan,’ I meant the theory of killing in cold blood forfeiting forgiveness in Heaven for the victim.”

49. Gilder, 59.

50. Gilder, 175.

51. Gilder, 175.

52. Gilder, 175.

53. This bit of business was subsequently dubbed “The Theft of the King's Sword” by A. C. Sprague and J. C. Trewin in Shakespeare's Plays Today (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 32. It began in this 1936 production and became popular with actors. Burton used it in the 1964 production directed by Gielgud.

54. Note added to chapter by Gielgud.

55. Gilder, 59.

56. Gilder, 195.

57. Gilder, 195.

58. Gilder, 197.

59. Gilder, 197.

60. BBC interview, “Hamlet: The Actor's View.” Gielgud also mentions that it was often left out in early twentieth-century productions and that Forbes-Robertson restored it to performances.

61. BBC interview, “Hamlet: The Actor's View.”

62. G. B. Shaw, “A Letter to John Barrymore,” Ladies' Home Journal, February 1926.

63. Gilder, 30.

64. Gilder, 33-34.

65. Note added to chapter by Gielgud.

66. Note added to chapter by Gielgud.

67. Gilder, 65.

68. Note added to chapter by Gielgud.